Home Cardio Workouts

If you live in a small space in the city, it can be hard to fit exercise into your daily routine. The smaller the space, the less room you have for anything “extra” like an elliptical machine, weights, or even a balance ball. With a small enough space, it can even be hard to integrate something simple like a TV and DVD player! That’s one of the reasons that dancing by yourself for an hour can be a great home cardio workout. You don’t need to buy special equipment that will go into storage after a few months, and you don’t have to hide the potentially embarrassing exercise videos at the back of your DVD collection.

As long as you have music playing, and a timer so you know when an hour has passed, you’ll get a great workout just moving and bopping to the beat. Adding ankle or wrist weights can up the calories burned, but might also increase fatigue enough to make you cut it short. To slim down, as opposed to gain muscle, it’s really more important to do something low impact for a longer period of time, so you work the slow twitch muscles to improve the lean endurance rather than improving the capacity for strength.

Finding a good podcast of music that lasts about an hour and is under 140 beats per minute (BPM) is a great way to get started with this type of workout. Or, if you get bored listening to music, having an hour-long audio book or television program playing could be helpful, as long as you remember not to sit down and to keep moving through the interesting plot points. Occasionally mixing it up by throwing in a few five-minute sessions of sit-ups or push-ups can help keep things interesting, and remind you to clean your floor more often, too.